Following months of steadily declining returns in his hedge fund, John Meriwether is offering some investors an early out.
Investors of the JMW Global Macro fund, the smaller of the two funds managed by Meriwether’s JMW Partners, are being offered the chance to pull out their money as soon as tomorrow, The Post has learned. Ordinarily, the fund’s investors would have to wait until the end of June to exit.
Meanwhile, investors of Meriwether’s flagship fund – the $1 billion Relative Value Opportunity fund, which had losses of nearly 32 percent as of the end of March – are less fortunate.
Those positions have to wait till the end of June to get any money back. Based on redemption requests already received for Relative Value, one-eighth of total assets – the maximum allowed – is scheduled to be yanked at the end of June, according to a person familiar with the situation.
It isn’t clear how much money will be pulled from Global Macro at the end of this month, but unlike with Relative Value, investors can pull out as much as 100 percent of their stake in the roughly $400 million fund, which lost 14 percent through March.
Officials of the Greenwich, Conn.-based firm have been calling Global Macro investors about an early exit because the fund has moved to cash as a way to protect against further losses, said a person familiar with the matter.
Meriwether’s Long-Term Capital Management became a household name after losing $4 billion in 1998.